Iron Council - China Mieville [152]
“It’s hard to find out your true name, like it’s supposed to be, but it can be done. There’s a black market in onomastics. But if it’s consolation, yours stayed hidden well. Magister Legus. I been trying to find out a long time.
“I came out of jail more than a decade ago. Graduated, we called it. The rumours, what we learn inside. We had something on every magister there is. You hear things. Drugs, boys, girls, blackmail. Nonsense, some of it. Legus, they said to me, Legus is a wily sod. You know he fucks the home secretary? As she was then.” She nodded at the cooling Stem-Fulcher. “That was information that never went away. Heard it often enough from those I trusted, inside and outside.
“Know how hard I been working on this, Legus?” She would not use his real name. “Getting myself ready. Had to fight to get my helmet made.” The child-arms patted her forehead. “I made myself; I been readying for years. To be exact, Legus,” she said, “you made me. Do you remember?”
“More than two decades gone. You remember those big old towers in Ketch Heath? Yes, you remember. That’s where I lived. I killed my darling. You remember, Magister? My girl Cecile.
“She cried and cried and cried and I was crying too and then I took her and I think maybe it was that I was shaking her to make her shush, I don’t remember, but she was gone when I remember again. And I took her down held close to keep her warm, to a sawbones worked gratis every other Blueday, but of course that didn’t work.
“And then there you were.” She leaned in. “You remember now?”
He did not. Of the thousands he had sentenced to Remaking, how could he remember one? Ori watched Legus. Toro reached up, tugged with a parent’s unthinking gentle playfulness at the child’s hand.
“You told me it was so I didn’t forget. I didn’t forget.” She leaned forward again and Cecile’s arms stretched out, toward Magister Legus holding the Mayor’s dead hand. There was noise. Their bomb-cavity was being breached. Toro pulled on her cestus. “It was her birthday just two weeks gone,” she said. “She’s older now than I was when I had her. My little girl.”
She stood and put her gun to Legus’ temple. Legus gripped Stem-Fulcher’s hand and opened his mouth but did not speak.
“From me,” she said. She did not sound angry. “From the men you made machines, the women you made monsters. Tanks, snailgirls, panto-horses, industry engines. And from all them you locked away in the toilets you call jails. And from all them on the run in case you find them. And from me, and from Cecile—and yes it was me, my hands done it, and that’s mine to feel. Cecile don’t grow, and she don’t rest. My girl. So this is from her too.”
She kept her pistol barrel to his head and punched him once then many times with her spiked cestus, and he grunted and gave out a blood retch and his face went ugly and he put up his hand not to ward her but in a reaching for something, not to interrupt the bihorned jabs—those he took, gripping his lover’s hand so hard her dead fingers splayed. He could not stop himself barking at the pain and spilling more blood down his front as Toro punched him in a miserable repetition, shoving horns into his gullet and heart, and her baby’s hands reached out above her onslaught and played with the dying magister’s hair.
Ori stood still while it was done and for a long time afterward. He waited for Toro to move—this small woman, with her south-city accent, her old grudge. After a minute or more when she did not, only sat with her head down while the magister put out his blood around her, he spoke.
“Come on,” Ori said. There was the sound of approach. “We have to go.”
She did turn to him, though he thought at first she would not. She looked with the effort of one waking and shook her head as if she did not understand his language. She did not speak, but she gave him to understand that she was going nowhere, that she was done.
“And, and . . .” Some pride or respect meant Ori would not have himself sound plaintive or aghast, and he spoke only when he